The World Spins

I attended a memorial recently for a young man I knew. Most of the others there were his agemates, buddies, past & present loves. And lots of dogs, a mass of flowers, & abundant weed. Plus plates and plates of food from one of the people closest to him because when all else fails at least there is food to offer. I think she spent three days cooking; she’s a generous soul who every day puts herself on the line for justice, kindness, connection.

I don’t even remember what we talked of; I admired the dead kid’s photos & the portraits others had done. He had a kind of goofy charm & a great smile. And he was around my younger kids’ ages.

What I remember, what still haunts me, was looking round that ragged circle of nomads and housies and dogs and all and thinking, hoping, wishing with all my heart that I could keep them all safe.

That nothing would hurt them. That no despair would cut their world into pieces. That they would live, thrive, find their way through the thicket of youth, poverty, ambition, drugs, hormones, frustration & joy & be the best they could.

It hurts.

There is no safety in this world, at least not that I can find or give out.

So I give out apples or oranges. At least there is food.

Two whales washed up on our beaches, juveniles. The science people tell me not to worry, there have been years in which twenty have beached and died. Two is nothing at all.

But there was the great flood of krill washed up on our beaches the week before, some still alive, some having mated, full of eggs. The scientists scratch their heads about this one. Possibly the ocean is too warm? Possibly—they don’t say this, but the thought comes—you know that radiation from Fukishima, still leaking, still making its way to us along with the wreckage of broken lives—could that be a cause?

My bold Finnegan, a Manx cat, brings me a snake. The snake is not very happy. Finnegan himself looks confused—what to do about the coiling, stretching creature? I thank Finnie for the gift and take the snake from him. It is still vigorous and seems unhurt. I tell the snake I’m sorry my cat grabbed it, and take it to a shady nook near my little fish tub, where it quickly disappears, I hope to safety.

If only I could do that with everything.

The world spins with accident, shock, revolt, and beauty.

A couple weeks ago I watched an expert tree climber ascend into an eagle’s nest and cradle the big eaglets in his arms, taking them to be measured and banded and then returning them to their home 95 feet in the air. He is infinitely patient and calm, talking to them in a quiet voice. They seem unflustered, and within a week or so they will fledge, fly from the nest, go out into the uncertain, beautiful world.

Today I watched a lot of cops take a protester from his perch in a wick draining crane down in Willits (the wonders of video & computers). Oddly, it reminded me of the treeclimber who tags eagles. The protestor, Will Parrish, had that sort of calm, and for once the cops seemed calm as well. Though I wonder why they needed dozens of cops for this one arrest (and the later one of Amanda “Warbler” for trespass in an area unmarked by no trespassing signs).

What are they afraid of, I wondered.

And wonder.

I know what I fear, and what I try to face straight on. I’m old enough to have a litany of losses and panoply of joys. I’ve seen change I could not have imagined or forecast. I’ve seen social changes I thought were set—eroded. Watching Wendy Davis live I saw in that rowdy, determined, brilliantly unruly gallery a lot of fresh young faces and some very staunch women who might have marched with me at the demonstrations of the 60’s and early 70’s. Oh, we thought then we had won the way for the generations to come. Peace and freely given (and protected) love. Barriers crashing.

We didn’t know. The story is change, nothing certain but the beauty of fierce determination.

About the wetlands protests one friend asked “well, isn’t it a done deal?” implying that a sane person would give up. But that isn’t an option, even when faced with the power of money, corruption, governmental sleaze.

It’s not an option, giving up.

Though we stand at a memorial, though we see the patterns before us, though the whales beach, though young souls take their lives, we must go on. We must keep telling the truth, offering our food or our solace, our passion, our wildness, cradling this world as the treeclimber cradled that eaglet.

Yes, it could tear our hearts out.

We do it anyway.

A Revolution of the Beautiful

I realized the other night, sorting through articles & photographs, calming my despair over photos of oilslicked birds & stories of death, loss, vigilance--I realized that in fact I was born into an atmosphere of grief, into a world of mourning, into a culture shell shocked, guilt ridden, & desperate.

And so, perhaps, were you.

When I was born, six decades ago, in a military hospital while my father waited on call for duty across the world, when I was born my mother sobbed inconsolably. Because, she said, I was a girl.
I would have to bear the pains of womanhood in this world, where her mother had died not a year before from a botched operation.

Yes, her labor had been hard. I bear to this day a memento of my hard delivery.

And yes, she was expected to birth a son. What to do with the football and the cute boy-blue clothing?

My grandfather sent small pink roses.

So I came in on a wave of grief, and I learned to sleep to the sound of trains and bombers, and I learned to hate the sound of air raid sirens, and I loved the Japanese hillsides and not so much the Mojave plains, where we waited for the end of the world in the early 1960's. As an officer's family we'd have nice quarters in the secret underground bunkers, waiting out the post nuclear radioactivity. No problem.

I loved the flowers of the high desert and the snakes. And we didn't die, and my father warned me against commies and we fought our own sort of cold war. My brothers became soldiers.

One went to jail for murder. One, after his time in the missile silos, retired to raise corn and cows in the Mississippi bottoms. And life goes on.

And I've lived six decades of wars, learning geography through atrocity stories.

You too, maybe. Or two decades, or four, or seven.

We've been huddled here in a sort of darkness, trying to deal with it all the best we can, at the edge of this stream of sorrow and joy.

The young travelers come by, and the old ones, in increasing streams. Words of loss come from across the planet and echo everywhere. Volcanic dust, earthquakes, white phosphorous, oil slicks.

How do we go on? How do we hold to an entire world of passion and suffering and not go under, and not give up?

No, I don't have the answers. But I think we sit with it, as we would sit with a crying child through the night, looking out into the trees for light dawning.

I think we play with it, when we can, like the group of people in Belgium--200 strong, who arranged a sudden dance/son explosion in the middle of the Antwerp train station, singing and dancing to a song from the Sound of Music.

Or like the soldiers in Afghanistan who posted a preposterous and silly video taking off from Lady Gaga's Telephone. With their cardboard and duct tape costumes, in the moments between...oh, death and murder, boredom, despair. They were good dancers.

I think we try in every creative, every grateful, every compassionate, every determined way to keep going. To listen to what gives us joy. To act on that knowledge.

It won't change the world. It won't stop the storms. But maybe we can transform some moment, some thought, some action.

I walked through the cemetery with my dog and sat beneath a dying cedar tree to watch a young hawk fly over the graves and the flowers. I watched a long while, the early sun warm on my face, the scent of mown grass in my nostrils.

Before I become part of the dust that softens the edges of this world, before I am still, I want to care more, dance more, sing more, watch more free flying hawks, love more.

And since every breath could be a last one, and every word a last one, I am not going to be caught saying "I give up". With every breath I am going to be saying Yes. Or at least...maybe. And "I love" and "how beautiful" and "let's be silly,let's make a revolution of the beautiful, of small pink roses, of courage".

And what will you be saying?

(I wrote this a few months ago for the newspaper my partner and I publish each month. I felt I wanted to share it here as well. The photo is of one of my supervisors, checking to make certain the newspapers are cared for.)